Hey again! Yes, I know, I'm blogging again. Gasp. Shock. Awe. Hehe.
This week I want to talk about what it takes to get blogging on a normal basis. If you read my post last week about losing weight and the discipline it took there, I thought surely I can get off my butt and actually blog on a normal basis. I can't let this blogging thing "beat" me, dangit! So, in my usual manner (as Rob can attest) I set out to figure out how I can do this on a normal basis by putting together my own little attack plan to start executing upon.
Here's Yet Another List (YAL) on what you can do to help make yourself blog more regularly:
- Set an attainable goal. That sounds familiar, huh? Same principle, last year I started trying to blog daily and just blog about every little random thought I had, and at the time I thought it was fun. And, it was for awhile, but I quickly realized that it just wasn't a natural pace for me. I was doing everything I could to enable this "insta-blogging" scenario where I could quickly pop open WLW, type, ctrl+enter to post, and it would automatically close for me. Yeah, that's great, but I don't think readers necessarily want to hear my everything little thought. If you really, really do, go read me on Twitter.
- Figure out your style. It's taken me, literally, YEARS to figure out what my style is for writing. I start off trying to do these huge article style posts, where I tried to be all articulate, have screenshots and illustrations and so forth; later, I tried doing the quick, easy going, talk-about-whatever's-on-my-mind style and that was fun, but exhausting for both me and my readers (IMHO), and now I'm falling out somewhere in between. I want to write about something that's worthwhile and I want to spend some time on it so that it's not a waste of your time. And, this really works for me. It makes it easier for me to put down whatever I'm doing and write.
- Don't forget! I just had to block off time in Outlook for "Writing a blog post". No joke. With reminders and everything! ;) I live and die by my Outlook calendar (even though I hate you, Outlook... seriously. stop looking at me like that.) so this is the most effective way for me to set that checkpoint to myself to say "Oh, crap, it's time for me to blog." I talked with James Shaw once about this and he sets up a AT job in Windows to pop-up WLW at a certain time/day. That's awesome! Whatever works for you. Right now I have a reminder to take an hour a week, every Wednesday at 1pm CST, to write my blog posts.
- Make time for blogging. Yes, there's always a million other things you need to be doing or should be doing, but blogging is JUST AS IMPORTANT these days. Not only does your company probably blog (if they don't, they should), but it's great therapy for you to unpack those topics that are swirling around in your head, and a great way to capture whatever may be on your mind. I'm constantly thinking about ideas, thoughts, subjects to post about, an opinion I may have, etc... there's no better way to record it than on my blog. Take the time to put down whatever you're doing to blog, and if something comes up keep blogging as a top priority! It's no less important than anything else you're doing. And, finally...
- Write it down. If you're like me, you constantly are thinking, "Oh, oh, that's a good idea or topic to blog about!" and then I promptly forget it completely 5 minutes later. Yes, I suck. But, in this case, I've started using 37signals Tadalist for just creating a list of topics that I want to blog about at some point. I currently have 12 topics in there. And, I'm usually putting a new topic into every day at least - I almost always have a "shower thought" that I think is bloggable.
